Initiatives

Overview

The financial crisis and its economic aftershocks have spawned the first serious examination of the structure of our current banking system and the public policies that have fueled consolidation over the last 30 years and untethered financial institutions from their communities.

Overview

Access to the Internet is an essential infrastructure for any community that cares about economic development, quality of life, and educational opportunities. Unfortunately, most communities are presently dependent on a few unaccountable absentee corporations that act as gatekeepers to...

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Wind and sun are available everywhere, so renewable energy can be economically harnessed at small scales across the country. This nature of renewable energy, and the exponential increase of renewable energy generation, promises to decentralize the nation’s grid system. ...

Overview

At the founding of the American Republic the word “private” had pejorative connotations. Derived from the Latin word “privare”, private meant to divide or tear apart. A privateer was a pirate. The word “public” was an honorable adjective, often...

Overview

ILSR's Waste to Wealth program helps communities across the country create policies and practices that address citizens' environmental concerns and economic needs. We help citizens fight the incinerators and landfills that pollute their air and water, and drive property...

The content that follows was originally published on the Institute for Local Self-Reliance website at http://ilsr.org/waste-industry-should-pay-living-wage/

Waste & Recycling News, February 4, 2013

John Campanelli does well to focus attention on garbage collection workers in our industry that are working difficult jobs for poverty wages (“Texas recycling death highlights wage, safety issue in the industry”). Workers along picking lines at recycling processing plants are in woeful straights as well. In Atlanta and Los Angeles, for example, Latino and Latina workers, earn minimum wages with no benefits, have temporary status and are subject to unhealthy conditions. Remarkably, these people do not even count in federal statistics. Industrial injuries and deaths of temporary workers are not recorded, despite the fact that temporary workers are exposed to more danger than most workers in the economy.

The situation in Los Angeles, in particular, is hard to understand because the city has a living wage ordinance. Yet workers employed by private MRFs contracted with the city are exempted. Greg Good from LAANE (Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy), reports that this may soon change as six private MRF companies have their contracts renewed.

It does not have to be this way. Workers doing the same job in San Francisco are unionized and make decent wages plus insurance and retirement models. Can this model work elsewhere?

Kevin Drew from the San Francisco Department of the Environment reports that the city is currently reviewing a new rate proposal from its contractor, Recology Inc., includes a new Teamsters contract. This detailed analysis will shed light on the issue of decent wages for recycling workers that could help other cities improve the conditions of recycling jobs.

Failing living wage and unionization efforts, these poverty wage jobs should not be considered green or sustainable.